bearing blog

Nighttime peace.

I think our youngest is night-weaned now. What with the co-sleeping, with him being well over three, and what with his unusually agreeable nature, it wasn't hard. We waited for an opportunity, that is, a string of weeks with no overnight trips planned for Mark. And then we changed places so that after the 3-year-old fell asleep nursing, Mark slept between him and me. We got up with a crying boy twice, and offered him ice cream or chocolate milk. That was it; he wakes up once in a while, and Mark says, "Shh, go back to sleep," and he snuggles up to his daddy and drops back out.

I miss him.

I have night-weaned three little co-sleepers before, and each time I was pregnant and in desperate need of deeper, wholly-uninterrupted sleep, plus some extra space around me. That's not the case now; I am not, therefore, relishing a few short months of solid sleeping before expecting a newborn to come along and shake things up. Co-sleeping has been good to us overall; I am well-adapted to the kind of sleep a mother gets when she sleeps every night next to her nursling, which is to say that I move from light sleep to deeper sleep easily, and I could not tell you "how many times he nurses" at night because I don't fully wake for it. But it is still a treat to fall into a deep sleep once in a while, especially on a Sunday afternoon when Mark takes all the kids and promises me an hour or two.

I woke up this morning, pleasantly well-rested, and thought about the fuzzy warm feeling of my little boy's head against my chin, and wondered if I would ever wake up with it again. Probably, I decided; Mark will be gone some nights and he will snuggle with me again; or maybe he will be sick, or maybe he will squeeze in between his dad and mama without Mark noticing. Still: Surely I don't have many more mornings like that with him left.

I suddenly felt, momentarily, very empty-armed.

I am not a touchable person. I am an anti-hugger, with mad skillz for turning aside and deftly deflecting people who come at me with kissy-faces and wide-open arms. Thank God for oxytocin, which makes it so that the few people who have made it past my prickly exterior -- my husband, my small children -- do not actually revolt me, unless they slobber on my face or something. (I could almost feel Maternal Affection burbling through my veins for the first time right after giving birth. What? What's that ... That feeling? As if I wanted to hold that baby? Why, I've heard tales of such things! How very interesting!).

As my older children grow older, I can see it happening in reverse -- the stifling of the hugging and the caresses. From my end. If a long-legged child comes up behind me while I am absorbed in planning or writing, and impulsively wraps his arms around my shoulders, I jump. "Sorry," he says sheepishly, and we both have a good laugh. But next time he'll remember my reaction, and he'll stop himself and pass me by, and go on to the kitchen in search of a glass of cold water, and I won't even know that he had the impulse to reach out and hug me.

I kind of wish I knew whether there would be any more children, something I don't know right now. Because then I could know whether I will regret not keeping the sleeping, warm, fuzzy three-year-old, scented faintly with chocolate ice cream and strawberry-flavored toothpaste, next to me just a few months longer. I wonder if that nightly exposure is the only thing that keeps my arms open at all.

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Augustine and attachment.

St. Augustine, in Book 1, Chapter 7, of The Confessions:

Who is there to remind me of the sin of my infancy (for sin there was:  no one is free from sin in your sight, not even an infant...); who can remind me of it?  Some ... tiny child now, in whom I might observe conduct I do not remember in myself?  

What then was my sin at that age?  Was it perhaps that I cried so greedily for those breasts?  Certainly if I behaved like that now, greedy... for food suitable to my age, I should provoke derision and be very properly rebuked.  

My behavior then was equally deserving of rebuke, but since I would not have been able to understand... neither custom nor common sense allowed any rebuke to be given.  

After all, we eradicate these habits and throw them off as we grow up.... so can we suppose that even in an infant such actions were good -- the actions of a child who

• begs tearfully for objects that would harm him if given, 
• gets into a tantrum when [persons] will not comply with his whims, 
• and tries to hurt many people... simply because they will not immediately... obey his commands, commands which would damage him if they were carried out?  

The only innocent feature in babies is the weakness of their frames; the minds of infants are far from innocent.

Yeah, I know.  It grates on me too.  But Augustine's writing about original sin, and that's not something I can reject out of hand.  Let's see what we can do about it.

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It grates because it sounds too hard on the normal, natural instincts of babies.  These are the instincts that drive maternal attachment and are their only means of communicating their needs to the adults that are charged with their care.  Those "greedy" cries are the same cries that stimulate a mother's milk, that activate compassion and an urge to protect the helpless child.  

You read something like that, and you kind of cringe, because someone is bound to take it too far and try to punish babies for crying.  (Though if they do, it's not Augustine's fault:   he approvingly describes parents and nurses who "charm away" and "cheerfully condone" babies' behavior, and says right there that "neither custom nor common sense" allows for a baby to be rebuked.)

Now that we know what we know about the biological basis of human attachment, can we really say that the "greediness" of babies is anything worthy of rebuke, or even that it is a consequence of original sin?

My edition of The Confessions (Ignatius Critical Editions, 2012) has a footnote here:

Critics of Augustine often point out how harsh he is toward babies... The point here, however, is not to condemn children for their seemingly selfish behavior when hungry or tired, but simply to point out that... we are born wholly "I-centered" with only our own interests in mind.  In a very mundane way, this now shows the noxious effects of the concupiscence Adam brought about when he turned himself and all his descendents away from God.  This is why we must learn to "speak" anew, to come to God with desires and intentions not turned in on self but on him.

Just like the parents and nurses Augustine describes, I'm used to treating infants' demands as necessary and natural communication.   So, if it's necessary and natural, how could it also be worthy of rebuke?  (Even if you add a modifier and make it "objectively" worthy of rebuke, the implication being that subjectively -- considering the infant's position -- it is not worthy of rebuke).

Consider this:  the adults who are charged with care of an infant, any infant -- its mother, father, siblings, other members of the household -- are themselves fallen creatures, self-centered, "I"-centered.  Perhaps we could consider the "wholly I-centered" nature of a newborn baby as a defense mechanism against the I-centeredness of adults.  If babies were not so relentlessly demanding, maybe more of them would be left unfed, unwarmed, untouched.  

And that makes it not so odd, then, to turn it around and say:  If adults were not themselves, by nature, "I"-centered, then babies might come programmed with an entirely different set of mechanisms to communicate their needs.  Maybe they wouldn't even need to communicate their needs because adults would provide for them before a need ever made itself known.

It's kind of like pain.  Pain is, we are told, a consequence of original sin.  Pain is objectively bad, but necessary in a world full of hazards; it communicates a bodily need.   So we can listen to it, and often we should immediately do its bidding.  We should be grateful for it, considering the circumstances in which we live.

• Move your hand away from that hot stove.  
• Stop walking and take the thorn from the sole of your foot.   
• Rest this limb until it feels better.

So it is with the "greed" of babies:   a necessary fault, one we should listen to and respond to immediately -- "cheerfully" even -- and be grateful for, considering the circumstances in which we live.

Once man and woman had fallen, maybe we could not have survived unless the most innocent -- those who have that feature, "the weakness of their frames" -- also shared the ability to clamor greedily from the very beginning.   Unless the greediness of the parents is somehow transmitted to the offspring, perhaps the offspring would not have had a chance in a world full of "I"-centered grownups who have the power to provide food and warmth, or to withhold it.

Parents who stay in touch with our babies know that the "greediness" of babies is something they need to have to make their way in the world, and so we respond to it.   We can appreciate the power they have of making their needs known, of drawing us outside of ourselves by clamoring from their own center.  We regard it, properly, as not a bug, but a feature.

A feature, that is, not of the original code, but instead of humanity's "plan B."  O felix culpa!  O happy fault!

Live streaming.

Lately, I've been overtaken by an odd sort of nostalgia, or maybe just an awareness of passing time: these kids I've got are getting bigger, and the clock keeps marching forward.

That's true, of course, but in a way the sense is detached from the reality of the now. A bus lumbers through the intersection in front of me, bearing an advertisement for a local urgent-care clinic, with a photo of a smiling eight- or nine-year-old boy, his hair mussed from having just taken off his hockey helmet. And I think: Ah, those were the days! But that's ridiculous, because I actually have an eight-or-nine-year-old boy, not a hockey-playing one (Deus avertat) and two younger ones coming up behind him, and I am only 38 and Still Have It, at least in the way that "It" matters for the purpose of this question, and for all I know there may be more.

Is it that my oldest is nearing thirteen? That I have lost the innocence of the mother-of-littles-only, and passed through that stage where your parenting theories are all still shiny, new, free of scuffs and dings? But I am thankful for that gift of experience, of wearing down the edges and corners of myself.

Maybe it's the slouching onward from being the young mother (not that I was ever super-young -- I had my first at twenty-five) to being the lady with all the kids (not that four is really all that many).

Part of it I think I know.

I am about nine years in, homeschooling, and just in the last couple of years I've felt myself hitting my stride. My third child is in first grade and so now I am doing some curricula for the third time, but I'm still tweaking and innovating and discovering the differences that different children bring to the schoolroom, and that they're really all getting individualized educations. I've got a great co-schooling routine twice a week; at the same time that I'm working on lengthy translations with the teens, I'm now back to amo, amas, amat with a batch of young elementary-school children, and am midway through my second trip through American history. And on the other side of co-schooling, I'm at peace with letting go of the control and allowing someone else to teach my children entire subjects. I've recently had to rough out plans for a high school curriculum so that I could get eighth grade squared away, and it looks do-able, not overwhelming.

All this happened slowly and with a great deal of focused work. Everyone who tackles the task of managing her own children's education brings something different to the work -- we are all entrepreneurs, free agents, distributed, running on our own operating systems. I brought an intense preference for tweaking curricula to suit my vision, for careful scheduling so there would never be a question of "what should we do today?" I brought a need to figure things out in writing, a thrill at learning while leading kids through subjects I don't have a strong background in (why would I want to teach French? I already know it), and a penchant for flow when I stay up at night, fueled by coffee, books splayed out on every surface, working out which passage to read when, and which concept needs more coverage to balance the other concept.

I do not have a penchant for flow when actually teaching children, except maybe when I get to sit next to just one child and teach math. I have some hopes to catch a little bit of it when I teach high school-level geometry next year.

Anyway -- who else out there is nine years into their career? After nine years, we should all be hitting our stride, getting better and better at the thing we do, and each thing we do prepares us better for the tasks ahead, right? Having invested so much time and training and experience in ourselves, we are specialists, confident, experts.

This is clearly, by now, the thing that I do. And I survey my younger children -- my daughter's got eleven years of education yet, and my youngest son hasn't started yet, I suppose there are fourteen or fifteen years ahead for him --

-- and don't forget that I Still Have It --

-- and, while the future may bring many things and I could make a different path at any time if necessary, it's apparent that this, this up-at-night-with-the-history-spreadsheet, this sitting-down-with-the-pattern-blocks, this hey-you-put-that-iPod-down-and-come-write-your-journal-entry, this will go on being the thing that I do.

And I am okay with it. I really am. I enjoy it. It is truly challenging, in the best way that an occupation can be challenging. I am one of those people who never stops moving -- that can be a character flaw, and is for me sometimes -- but one thing about that, it suits this thing I do very well.

But occasionally I find myself astonished by what I have done, and by what I plan to do.

I am living in a life that once seemed too improbable to even give voice to desiring. And I have tossed myself in, senselessly. And it's exhilarating, and difficult, and way more messy than I can stand, honestly.

And I have slowly realized that nine years of specialization helps, but that it doesn't guarantee that I will be an expert in whatever happens in the future. And eventually, no matter how expert I am at teaching my small children, biology will say to me, "You're fired."

Nothing in this life looks like an advertisement, that's for sure.

The astonishment is that (a) this situation is permanent, and (b) that it never stops evolving. Though I may have many years left of it, I now know from experience that nothing in it can be held firmly, it is always slipping away, and that is what makes it so very, very important, every minute of it, present, now.

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Accepting apology.

I take my three-year-old to a birth-through-age-five, music-and-movement class that meets once a week in my neighborhood.  Our family's been doing the classes since my first was a toddler and my second a newborn, so -- nearly ten years!   

In those years we've seen many other families come and go.  A mother arrives with a toddler and a newborn; and a year or two later the older one disappears into the school system; and a year or two later the family is done with music class.  But we're still going.  I usually have one or two of the older ones with me, too; they stay in the anteroom and work on math or read books while I'm in the studio with the 3yo and the other children, singing and waving scarves.

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This quarter the class is fuller than usual -- due to a combination of babies being born during the course of the session, and a computer glitch that accidentally allowed too many families to sign up.  And it can get boisterous in there.   The instructor is very easygoing about the children getting up and moving around the room, as long as they're not running with claves, and I'm pretty used to that.  It is a music-and-movement class, after all.  

Today, however, in the middle of a song, a frustrated mother from across the room got up, walked over to me, and said:  "Can you please keep your son from running around the room?  All the other children are following him!"  (Including, I assume, her own two-year-old daughter.)

I was caught off guard because it's pretty usual for the children to be running around the room -- but I immediately saw three things:  (1) She was new, (2) there are more children than usual and so running around might actually be a problem in this particular class, (3) I was sitting right next to the instructor -- and I knew that I could trust the instructor to talk to us separately if there was a problem.  So I apologized to her, and then I grabbed my 3yo as he trotted by and pulled him into my lap for a Tickle of Redirection.

While I had him in my lap I whispered to him, "See that mommy over there?  She got worried because you were running around the room and her little girl wanted to do what you are doing.  It's okay to run, but can you help her forgive us?  Can you go apologize to her?"

I admit that part of me, feeling stung, wanted to show off my good-mothering skills.  As I've written before, the disciplinarian in me is pretty smug about having mastered the art of teaching kids to apologize.

"Okay, mama," he said, and a song or two later he danced over and said -- not actually to the correct mommy, but I think perhaps she heard him anyway -- "I'm sorry I was running, will you forgive me?"

+ + +

Part of me was a little indignant about this whole thing because it isn't, after all, against the rules for the small children to run and dance around the room in this class.  (Just as I was leaving the studio I caught sight of the instructor starting a conversation with the worrying mother, but I didn't stick around to eavesdrop.)  And I started to be indignant on behalf of my three-year-old.  Maybe I shouldn't have sent him to apologize.  Why should he feel ashamed or bad just because she didn't like the way he was playing?

And then I realized that he did not give any sign whatsoever of having felt ashamed or bad.  He had danced right over there, eagerly, and recited the words he has learned.

Apologies in our household are so common, so routine, and so ritualized that for most of us they don't have any connotation of humiliation.*  

I don't punish kids by making them apologize.  

I tell them that we do it to help the other person forgive them, and it doesn't matter whose fault something was or whether the other person was wrong; the point is to smooth the way to forgiveness, something we always should desire from anyone who is unhappy with our behavior -- justified or not.

It was a nice reminder, seeing my three-year-old cheerfully dancing around the room afterwards, free, and I felt my own indignation at "having been made to apologize" evaporating as I contemplated him.

I think there'd be a lot fewer "fake apologies" and "apology-non-apologies" in the world if we all understood that there's nothing inherently humiliating or false about apologies -- if we understood that the point of apology is nothing more than a desire for forgiveness -- for the sake of someone else who needs to forgive -- put into words and actions.  It's not necessarily or only a way of saying "I was wrong and I need your forgiveness."  It can also be a way of saying "You need to forgive me, and I want what's good for you."

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*I do have one child, age nine,  who finds it hard to summon the words "I'm sorry," even with a script.  He turns a little red and smiles nervously.  I think it's more performance anxiety than anything.  I find I need to take a little more care with him, so that he doesn't interpret the act of apologizing as a humiliating punishment -- but I still think that the practice is good for him, and that the repetition will make it easier eventually.

Babies mid-homeschool-year.

All the birth discussion in the previous post and the other post that wasn't originally about birth brought on a reader question via email.

...as a new homeschooler, I'd love to hear how you've dealt with homeschooling while both feeling terrible during pregnancy (I don't actually puke during my pregnancies but usually feel like I could and I sleep twice as much as usual) and then recuperating postpartum. 

But your last baby was definitely mid-school year. Did you stop school entirely for a month and make it up early/late in the year? Did you plan curriculum in advance that didn't require much micromanaging so you could go on auto-pilot when things were rough?

I feel like I've got a handle on homeschooling, planning meals, working a few hours a week ...  and going to a gym regularly, but throwing a pregnancy in with everything seems like it would be tricky.

 

I'm a control freak, so I get what you're saying.

Tricky, yes.  So far for us, impossible, no.

Since pregnancies and school years are the same length, if you are going to have a pregnancy in the middle of the school year, you know it with enough time to adapt your schedule. 

When I was pregnant with my daughter, #3, my oldest son was 5.  She was born in the summer, but the morning sickness and fatigue was midyear.   

If I was doing it over again I wouldn't even have worried about it (kindergarten!  sheesh!) but back then, since he was my very first homeschooled child, I felt some pressure to keep up the schedule.   I let the five- and two-year-old boys watch a lot of DVDs in the afternoon.  

One thing I did during a period when I felt guilty about how much screen time the two-year-old boy was having was to lay in a supply of good educational or otherwise quality DVDs.  That two-year-old was fascinated by nature documentaries, so I bought this huge collection of BBC nature documentaries.  

Yes, it was expensive -- I remember the sticker price, $180 at Best Buy back then.  (Same price at Amazon today).  In retrospect, because that two-year-old watched every single disc many times, it was money very well spent.  We also invested in a lot of  Signing Time.

When you have a plan to use DVDs,  you can show a lot of DVDs while you are napping and still feel like you are Sticking To A Plan.  At that time, I felt okay in the morning, so we did math and reading first thing and then I put on DVDs while I slept in the afternoon.   Here is a blog post I wrote around that time:

There is an unbelievable amount of stuff that has to get done around here.  My Ideal To-Do List is about twenty lines long.  My Real To-Do List is as follows:

• Get dressed
• Feed children
• Do math or reading
• Feed children again
• Take nap while children dump toys on floor and watch DVDs they got for Christmas that I haven't had time to screen yet (please, someone tell me that Madagascar is not too objectionable, because they've already watched it four times and I haven't seen it yet)
• Possibly make dinner

That's all that happened today.  Laundry?  Nope.  Clean up after breakfast or lunch?  Nope.  Schoowork prep?  Nope.  Packing any boxes (supposedly we're moving on Saturday)?  Nope.  Blogging?  Okay, one entry (other than this one), made while we ate breakfast. 

 

When I had my boy who is three years old today(!), the morning sicknessand fatigue came in the late spring, a time when I'm winding down anyway.  Once again I felt okay in the morning, so it did not cause too much trouble, as we could have easier afternoons.   Since he was to be born in late January, I planned my year to include an extra three-week break after the birth.   I started school on August 17th and my records seem to indicate that I stopped around June 14 or 15.   We always do sporadic lessons in the summer, so I never worry if I have to cut the regular school year short by a day or week here and there.

I operated on a somewhat reduced schedule for the first couple of weeks back -- my oldest was in fourth grade and could work pretty well from a to-do list, but I cut back to essentials (math, reading) for my boy who was in kindergarten.   H. and M. took good care of me on co-schooling days, which remained at my house for several weeks.

I'm always helped by my drive to "get back to normal" after a birth -- a few days in bed and I'm itching to get up.  Not so good for my pelvic floor, but good for schooling, I guess.

I am hiding in my room to write this post.

Man, do I hate the first couple of days back at school after a long break.

Yesterday we had our "reading day" to wean them off the steady diet of video games and TV they enjoyed during our extended stay at the g-parents'. No screen time except for the hour after lunch (the usual amount), but they could play or read or go outside -- whatever -- while I got my schoolroom back together and figured out what I needed to do next. That went fine.

Today I sat across the table from my 6- and 9-year-olds and watched -- exhorted -- declaimed -- pulled my hair out as each of them took TWO HOURS to do a math lesson that should have been about half an houris (20 minutes, tops, for the 6-yo). My 9-yo has just started a new 4th-grade book that eases into things, and the first section of his lesson was simply to write out eleven different numbers, some given in digits to be spelled out in words, some spelled out to be written in digits. He was given a chart with all the necessary words spelled out, and a list of the hyphenation rules to refer to.

Readers, this is not a child with a learning disability. Readers, it took me more than an hour to exhort him to finish this lesson-part, occasionally having to run after him and bring him back to his desk ("Oh, yeah! I have to do my math!"), and he STILL miscopied "ninty" for "ninety" AND left out all the hyphens.

And let's not talk about the 6-yo. Things weren't so different for her.

You know, I am never tempted to send the children to school. Really, I am not. For one thing, I have never done it, so I have no memories of a golden age when I got several hours of quiet time every day, or a chance to work for wages at a job among grownups. For another thing, I am perfectly aware that problems I can see happening before my own eyes might well slip under the radar of an instructor, however gifted, in a classroom of twenty-five children. For a third thing, I am quite intellectually convinced of the adequacy of homeschooling and of the reasons it is the best choice for our family.

But I am tempted to raid the pile of Christmas chocolates at tea-snack time and then hide upstairs under the guise of taking a loooooooong shower. Also to spend the day shrieking things like, "Do you KNOW how RIDICULOUS this is? Do you know you could have been done with this NINETY MINUTES AGO? What is going on? No, it isn't because you are bad at math, it is because you are CHOOSING not to SIT in your chair and DO it!"

Something about there being two children instead of one who are both pulling the same thing, right in front of me, is crazy-making. I can only "make" one of them work at a time. When I turn to one, the other twirls her chair, sneaks jawbreakers out of her desk and wanders off to look for scissors to open them with; when I notice she is gone and go after her, the first one starts drawing ninjas in the corner of his paper.

I hope this is a passing phase related to the "first week back" phenomenon. Because while I am not exactly tempted to quit, I am sorely tempted to cast about wildly for something, anything, that will "work," whether that is concomitant with my long-term goals and values or not.

Or just to give up and start drawing ninjas myself. Pass the chocolate.

Brief story about the adoption of teenagers.

Here is a short, hope-affirming story about the adoption of teenagers in Minnesota. Some of the metrics have improved a lot in the state, perhaps brought about by these changes:

Some of the state's progress has to do with its diversion programs, which keep families intact and children out of foster care. But state officials believe the adoption process is quicker and more aggressive as well. In two years, the state has halved the number of kids seeking adoptions who reach age 18 without parents. And over the past decade, the state has reduced the time it takes to move children from state guardianships to finalized adoptions from 24 months to 16 months.

County workers now ask older foster children about influential relatives, teachers or other adults in their past and follow up with those adults to see if they'd consider adoption. Private agencies, hired by the state, assist counties in finding matches for adoptive children, and recruiting families even if they had stopped pursuing adoption. Pre-adoption classes emphasize the needs of teens and dispel myths that they don't benefit from adoption as much.

The article highlights one adoptive family, headed by a widowed mother of a younger teenager.

I almost can't imagine the difficulty of welcoming an older child with a troubled, loss-filled past into my family. The article left me wanting to know more about the families who are making it work, and the ones who are struggling, in my state. And it left me wondering about the outcomes -- those that can be measured and counted, and those that can't -- for adults who were adopted as teens.

 

The dark side.

In the middle of the night my nearly-three-year-old nursling kicked and struggled off the blankets and then burbled, "Mommy milk."

"Coming up," I murmured and started to roll over.

At which he sat up and declared loudly, "Mommy?  You're my lifesaver."

Or perhaps it was "light saber."

And then he latched on and fell right to sleep.  As did I.

I'm glad to still be co-sleeping with this little guy.  Two of my other three kids were already going to sleep in another bedroom by this age.  There are definitely pros and cons to getting them out and sleeping on their own -- but having done it both ways, I like keeping them with me, especially when they talk in their sleep.

At the movies.

We took the kids to see a matinee of Wreck-It Ralph yesterday.  

(Fun movie -- Mark and I liked it a lot -- and the short animated film that precedes it, "Paperman," is beautifully animated: classic Disney.)

The not-quite-three-year-old is not quite sure what he thinks about "big movies."  He sits on my lap, hides his face sometimes, studies the screen and doesn't smile or laugh, nurses a lot.

This time he watched most of the movie.  He started out squeezed between Mark and me (the theater armrests flip up and out of the way -- a benefit to bigger-these-days moviegoers, I guess, but I bet the teenagers appreciate it too).    Not too far into the film he climbed up on my lap and leaned back into me, watching the movie in the studious sort of way he does it, one little leg hanging down on either side.  I wrapped my arms around him and he took hold of the fingers of my hands in front and held them tightly.  I buried my nose in his hair from time to time in the darkness and inhaled the toddler fragrance:  fruit-scented shampoo, a faint whiff of Christmas chocolate.

Movie theaters give me a strange feeling of nostalgia.  It might simply be because I haven't gone often since we had children, which wasn't long after we were married and so being in one takes me back pretty far.   I remember being little, scared by the Blueberry Girl scene inWilly Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (the one with Gene Wilder) and having to be taken, sobbing, from the theater.  I remember going to see Dirty Dancing with my best friend in seventh grade, one of the first times I was allowed to go to a movie without adults, and the two of us gushing about it being the best movie ever afterwards. My most intense memory is of being deeply frightened and thrilled by Terminator 2 in the summer of 1991 -- in a dark theater, I can easily conjure up the sick feeling of watching that nuclear-bomb scene.  I remember going with Mark in 1997 to see the re-release of Episode IV of Star Wars in a brand new theater in Columbus with cushy captains' chairs -- I think it was actually on its opening night -- and being secretly charmed by the slightly younger geek behind me, who was positively bouncing in his chair with slavering excitement.  

My favorite memory:  I had the great good fortune to view Dr. Strangelove:  or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb -- for the first time -- in a packed movie theater on the Ohio State campus, as part of a Kubrick retrospective.  Comedy is funnier in a theater, you know -- and the evening I spent experiencing that gem of a satire in the company of a hundred other young adults, most of whom had never seen the movie before, was an experience I would not trade away for a hundred big-box matinees.

Yesterday, after the trailers finished and the lights dimmed, the Disney intro started ("when you wish upon a star....") with its swooping vista of the castle and fireworks, and I was taken back again.  It reminded me, briefly, of my late mom, who was one of the world's great appreciators of all movies, and who probably would have enjoyed the modern crop of high-standards animations put out by Disney, Pixar, and Dreamworks.

I hope I manage to squirrel away the memory of the warm, surprisingly heavy weight of my littlest guy leaning back in my lap, of his wide eyes and of his fingers wrapped around mine.  It won't be too long before he demands his own seat, first (probably) between his dad and me, and later (probably) with those big brothers at the other end of the row.

We win.

Having deja vu about this topic, so stop me if I've told it before.

Yesterday evening our family went to a show at the Children's Theatre Company (did you know it's the only children's theater to win a Regional Theatre Tony Award?  Yup, pretty awesome) and then, as is our custom, we went out for a late dinner at a restaurant.  It was almost 9 p.m. when we found a place to park the car.

We try to pick places that tend to be empty on a late Thursday, since it's hard to walk in and get a table for six otherwise.  You'd be surprised how much variation there is in that.  A couple of weeks ago when Mark was out of town for a long business trip, I got a babysitter and went out (also on a Thursday night) to have dinner by myself, and tried a new pub in the next neighborhood -- the menu was fine, kid-friendly, and the beer was excellent, but the place was completely packed.  It was a forty-five minute wait for a table.  I didn't mind (I sat at the bar), but I crossed it off my "walk in with the whole family" mental list.

Lots of places, though, are empty at 9 p.m. on a Thursday.  If you can't scout it out ahead of time, you can make a good stab at it by seeing who has a happy hour that starts around then.  Personally, I think a mostly-empty pub at happy hour is a perfect place to walk in with four hungry kids and two thirsty grownups.   You can actually get a pretty good deal on dinner that way, especially if some of your kids are thrilled to eat the nachos and wings that are on the happy hour menu.  

It's still a little fun to see the host's eyebrows flinch when we walk in.    I only have 4 children, and I always wonder about what the flinch looks like when it's more than that.

+ + +

In this particular iteration of toddlerhood, we've been extremely lucky.  Our youngest, who's not quite three, has been a very peaceable restaurant baby from the beginning:  he eats slowly and so stays occupied throughout a dinner, is content to sit in a chair or on a lap, doesn't throw things, and isn't very loud.  (Not all of our toddlers have been like this.  We had an 18-month stretch of never ever going anywhere at one point.)  We go out fairly often -- we take a lot of road trips, for example, and then we have the theater-and-late-dinner tradition, and I like to celebrate our anniversary with dinner for the whole family at a Dress Up restaurant.

Does 

Along the way somewhere we developed The Game.

It goes like this:

If a server, or even better, another diner in the restaurant, comes over to our table and compliments us on our very well-behaved and polite family, we win The Game.

If nobody says anything to us, we don't win The Game.

That's it.  We don't give the kids a prize for winning, or a punishment for failing to win.  We just smile and tell the kids (if they didn't happen to hear) "Guess what?  We won The Game."  Or, if nothing happens, the nine-year-old will ask as we are leaving the restaurant, "Did we win The Game, Mom?"  and I will say "Not this time," and the children will sigh and be slightly disappointed.

+ + +

Some time ago the oldest decided that it was important that there be a way of losing The Game, so it was decreed that if anyone ever makes a point of coming to the table to tell us what horrible children we have, or to ask us to be quiet because we are bothering other diners, then that will be an instance of Losing The Game.  Hasn't happened yet, though.

+ + +

Last night we won The Game:  the server came over and in an awestruck voice told us that we had very well-behaved children.  (The clear subtext was "You struck fear in my heart when you came in with four children at nine p.m. on a weeknight, but it turned out that my fears were unfounded.")  Everyone was pleased.  It seems that The Game motivates everyone to be excruciatingly careful about pleases and thank yous, and also to be solicitous of the toddler so as to prevent his screeching with dismay.  

We have runs of bad luck at restaurants from time to time.  (We have particular trouble at Indian restaurants.  For some reason, somebody always knocks over a mango lassi.  Always.  If we ban mango lassis, then they knock over water glasses instead.)  I try not to be intimidated, though.  I have to admit that a lot of the stress of going to restaurants with kids is relieved by a rule-of-thumb that I made long ago, when I had two small children, and used to be anxious about the spills and messes  -- 

Smile and tip generously.

(The more I think about this, the more I think it's only right.  Children create the same amount of work, or more, for a server than an adult diner does; but they eat less-expensive food and don't drink alcohol, so if you just tip the standard 15 percent, the servers and busboys who work your table are systematically underpaid.)

I don't know if twenty percent is really enough -- I've never run the numbers, I suppose I ought to -- but if everyone is pleasant and nothing gets spilled, we tip 20% as a minimum.  I'll tip 25% if we make a big mess or if the server is especially helpful to us for some kid-related reason.

Because really, I want the server to be thinking when we come in:  Hey, that one family with the four kids is in my section.  I win!